Bloodloss
by Darth Nickels
Summary: AU, oneshot: Luke takes his sister and his father on a fairly routine mission to recover a squadron of missing New Republic troops, unaware that the planet of their destination holds an ancient and terrifying secret.


_A/N: both Samhain and Dia de los Muertos have passed, but I'm still in the mood, so I thought I'd upload an old fanfic I found. AU where Vader survived the Battle of Yavin_

* * *

The mission to Tallan IV had gone from bad to worse, and was quickly approaching disastrous.

Their mission wasn't even difficult- discover the source of the AWOL Republic troops in the Tallan system. Luke wouldn't even have gone, much less taken a team of two other Jedi, except that he'd sensed something exceptionally unusual was going on- too complex for anyone but the master of the Jedi Order.

In retrospect, perhaps taking his father and his sister had been simply baiting the Force too much. Their mutual civility had been worn down to tatters before they even landed on the planet, and now—

"Father! Leia! _Father_!" He called, feeling increasingly foolish. They had been _right beside him_. How could he lose the two people in the entire Galaxy with the same obnoxiously bright Force presence as he had? He had sensed them, the barely restrained ire in Leia and his father's stubborn refusal to give his daughter the space she required, when…

_"Watch out everyone," he'd warned, "I sense something in this fog that isn't right." He ignited his lightsaber, but the light could not penetrate the thickening mist._

_ "Do you sense it too-?" he asked, turning around to confront his oddly quiet companions- only to find that they were gone._

"Leia wouldn't just _disappear," _he said, stubbornly, addressing nothing but the empty air. "Neither would my father. They—hello?" he turned, but caught only a flash of movement out of the corner of his eye. He held his lightsaber in front of him, firmly.

"I'm gonna need you to come out where I can see you!" he called, feeling even more stupid once the words were out of his mouth. As…_unfit_ as his father was to be a Jedi, he would have said something with more weight to it. 'Show yourself', brief and intimidating-

His thoughts were interrupted by a soft chuckle somewhere behind him. "Luke, your mind is wandering again."

There was no way. It just wasn't possible.

"Aunt Beru?" he said, bewildered. "How—"

"You've gotten so big," the apparition whispered, "and handsome, and brave…oh Luke, I'm so proud."

The words touched a place in Luke's heart that had healed over years ago—as much as he'd been bored and stifled while living on Tatooine, his Aunt and Uncle had done a good job raising him. He had _loved_ them.

But he didn't lower his blade.

"Oh, Luke," she said, shaking her head and smiling benevolently. "You don't need that. It's only me. Can I not visit my favorite nephew?"

"How can you be here?" Luke asked, trying to keep his voice steady. "How did you-"

"Oh, I learned the trick from your friend Obi-Wan Kenobi," she replied, waving her hand. "It's not really important. I need to ask you for something, though."

Luke almost didn't need the thrill of _danger danger danger_ he sensed in the Force. There was something…._wrong _with his late Aunt. Something that made the hairs on the back of his neck raise, that triggered and instinct even deeper and more primal than his connection to the Force.

"I can be with you again," she continued, smiling sweetly, but somehow not enough to reach her eyes. "I can talk to you on this planet, but I can cross over- I just need your help."

Luke lowered his lightsaber slowly, but never took his eyes off Aunt Beru. "How? The Emperor lied, there is no secret to stopping the power of death."

"But there is," she said, less sweet and with more urgency, "Luke, I need something from you. I can be corporeal again, physically alive- we can be together…"

"What?"

"I need your blood, Luke," she said, without losing her kindly, grandmotherly look. "I need just a taste of your heart's blood." She motioned towards the ground, which Luke realized was a shallow basin, cut into the stone and obscured by the undergrowth.

"That's what this planet was for, Luke- that's what people have been doing for thousands of years here. Take the knife. Take it…"

Luke bent, slowly, and brushed aside the vines. He withdrew what was little more than a piece of volcanic glass, blunt at one end and razor sharp on the other.

"I love you so much, my sweet boy," she purred. "You-"

She didn't have time to finish. Luke threw the knife, aided by the Force, and immediately leapt into action, swinging his lightsaber. The apparition that was _not _his aunt shrieked, seemingly unharmed as his blows passed through the blue mist of her form but clutching her head, where the stone knife had passed- her hand moved, and Luke saw a hole in her figure, the edges glowing as though smoldering.

"UNGRATEFUL BRAT!" not-Beru shrieked, "AFTER WE TOOK YOU IN OUT OF THE GOODNESS OF OUR HEARTS AND RAISED YOU-"

"We both know that's not true," Luke replied, stonily. He danced in and out of her field of vision before reclaiming the knife.

"Get out of here. _Now_"

For a moment, the figure flashed- the kindly form of his aunt become a nightmarish apparition, with empty eye sockets and a gaping maw of needlelike teeth- before shrieking like an animal and disappearing.

"Luke! It's a—" Leia burst through the trees, somewhat clumsily swinging her lightsaber in one hand and firing off blaster shots with the other. She paused when she saw him unharmed. "It's a trap."

"Thank you Leia," he said, grinning shakily. "Did you…?"

"Yeah. One of those monsters…" she shook her head. "It pretended to be Bail. Knew it wasn't, though…lost him in the woods. I guess I'm catching up to you in Jedi prowess."

Luke's pride briefly replaced the sick feeling in his stomach seeing his Aunt that way had caused. "I told you the Force was strong with you."

Leia made a face. "Where's Anakin?"

Luke's face fell. "I haven't seen him since we were separated."

They both felt the sudden tear in the Force- the feeling that something was _wrong_. "Surely he isn't stupid enough to-" Leia began, incredulously, but Luke had already begun crashing through the woods in the direction of the disturbance.

"Father! FATHER!" he shouted, clearing the brush in his way with wild swings of his lightsaber. "Father, don't do it! Don't-"

He stumbled as the wood abruptly gave way to a large clearing. The air shimmered with pale blue figures, all flickering- one moment they were serene Jedi dressed in the manner of the Old Republic, and the next they were monsters like the one that had pretended to be Beru. Luke's heart sank.

It was just as he'd feared- his father was in the middle of the ring, and his helmet and pauldron lay on the ground beside him. Blood flowed freely down his chest, as the pale blue figure of a petit woman could only tenderly lap up so much-

"Get back! Get back!" he shouted, showing the beings the knife. They drew back and hissed, howling impotently. Leia was right behind him as he sprinted madly to his father, trying to ignore the way Anakin lovingly had his arm positioned around the woman's incorporeal shoulders.

"Luke," Vader said, his mouth tinged red with his own blood, "Luke, I finally…"

"She isn't real!" he said, imploringly, "you have to move away, you have to let us kill it!"

The woman looked up from her feast, hissing and baring rows of needle teeth in a human mouth.

"No!" Vader moaned, "no, it's going to be—"

Leia did not give her father a chance to explain. She grabbed his wrist, still clutching his own bloodied stone knife, and wrenched it from his weak grip. The woman drew back, her form flickering wildly from human to monster.

"IT'S GOING BACK TO HELL!" Leia bellowed, and struck the creature with the edge of the blade, drawing a diagonal line of fire across the thing's face. It shrieked and lunged, only to be met with Luke's own blade. Abandoned by its companions and badly wounded, the apparition howled with displeasure before disappearing as the others had.

Anakin collapsed. Luke rushed to his side, letting his panic vanish into the Force as he withdrew his med kit. The bacta patches they had weren't made for this, there was no way his father would survive…

Leia shoved him out of the way, placing both her hands on the wound. "Just put as many on there as you can! He's- he's lost _a lot_ of blood!"

Luke looked up into his father's eyes, surprised to find him still unconscious. He looked as though he'd been betrayed.

"How…could you?" he gasped. "Did you not see who that was?"

Though she bit her tongue, Leia's feelings of disbelief and disdain were deafening. "It wasn't her, don't you see?" Luke said, gently. "She wasn't real."

"I was going to bring her back," he said, weakly. "I was…she was going to come back."


End file.
